Hello friends. My name is Richard Moss, and I’m here on conscious.tv. I’d like to share with you a short meditation on letting yourself become big enough to hold even the most difficult and dark feelings. When the American president, Franklyn D Roosevelt took office shortly after the beginning of the great depression, he told the American people - and through that all the way to the world - “that the only thing to fear is fear itself.” My experience as I journey, is what stops most of us moving forward in our lives, is feelings we’re afraid of. Feelings that we don’t know what to do with. So in this meditation, I’d like you stop for a moment and think about the kinds of places in your life where you become afraid. Afraid of abandonment, or loss. Afraid of not succeeding. These are the stories you tell yourself. A fear of loss, a fear of abandonment. A fear of aloneness, a fear of not being loved, a fear of not being wanted. But the actual sensation. So if you close your eyes and you realise that you have this blessed gift of awareness, and that awareness has two qualities. It allows you to become precisely focused, but it also allows you to stay open. Open, big, extended. So what I’ve learned to do in myself and what I’ve been able to teach many, many people is how to hold very dark, or difficult feeling. So here’s what you learn to do.

Slow your breath down a little bit. Turn your inner gaze toward whatever it is that’s disturbing you, scaring you, and you’re going to stay with it. But you’re not going to fall into it, collapse into it. You’re going to guard yourself against letting your mind think. Don’t say I have felt this before. Do an experiment. Make believe that this feeling that you’re calling fear, loneliness, abandonment, or betrayal, is actually something you have never felt before, which of course is true from the point of view of awareness. This moment is always new. So turn your gaze towards it and with a feather soft touch, keep that inner gaze on it, whatever this feeling is. This difficult feeling. This feeling of threat, or dread. This feeling that you’re going to lose yourself. Whatever this dark feeling is that stops you trusting life, going forward with life. You just start breathing softly. Touch it softly, and at the same time become aware of your whole body. Feel your feet, feel your legs. Notice your breathing. Touching softly this feeling, extend out if you’re in a room, or in nature. Listen. Listen to the sounds that are around you. Hear. Smell. Everywhere in the universe right now, it’s now. So extending your awareness, getting expansive and yet precisely focused on this feeling, and relax in your body. Relax. Focus on this difficult feeling, and get bigger. Bigger than the room, bigger than the house you’re in. Bigger than the city. Another way to get bigger is to realise that if you’re afraid or alone, there are millions of people on planet earth this moment that are feeling afraid and alone, and the recognition that you’re feeling this dark difficult, scary feeling, it’s not just yours, that others struggle with it too. Your work with this feeling respects that others feel it too, and it helps them take a deeper step towards this feeling.

So you’re focused and open and spacious. So you’re open and your breath is slow. Your body relaxes. And when the mind goes, “but I’ve felt this before”, you go “thank you that’s just a story based on the past, I’m not going to listen.” And when you’re mind says “when’s this going to stop?” which is your mind going into the future, you’re going to say “no, I’m going to stay right here.” This gaze, this touch, breathing, listening. What are the sounds? Get your senses really acute, expansive, staying open. It’s like the sun. It shines on the earth, but it shines limitlessly into space. Your aware mind shines on this dark, scary feeling, but it also shines out into the now, into other sounds, into your whole body. Beyond your body. So if you can stay spacious, and keep relaxing, and you don’t tell yourself a story that this is a bad feeling, that you shouldn’t feel this, that there’s something wrong with you because you feel this, instead you just breath, and hold the feeling. Touch it softly, very softly. Anything we touch gently, and compassionately, and softly, we are bigger than that. It takes a spacious mind to be soft. Small minds are aggressive, tough and hard. Spacious minds are soft. So be very soft, and relax, and make space.

I know from my own experience that there are sometimes feelings that you think are so overwhelming, that you could tell yourself a story, “I will lose my mind. This is unbearable.” It’s not true. Your aware self is bigger, bigger than any feeling. So breathe slowly, get bigger, relax, and expand. Stay with the feeling softly touching it. Without thought, feeling always changes. You have to think, to keep a feeling locked. A feeling that seems blocked, means you keep thinking about it, keep judging it. You keeping saying I don’t want it, this is a wrong feeling, that’s what locks it in. That’s what keeps you blocked. So just get bigger. Relax. Touch this feeling very, very softly like a feather. Breathe slowly, softening your body, and the feeling will pass through.

Now we’ve been running from these feelings since we were children. So it takes a little time to learn that you are bigger than any feeling no matter how difficult, how threatening. But I promise you, from thirty five, forty years of experience, there is nothing bigger than your aware self. You can be gentle with the most frightening feeling. Once you learn to do this, you won’t be afraid of people, that they’ll hurt you. You won’t be afraid of success. Even big feelings of love, many of us are afraid to feel joy, real joy. So when you feel this sense of love, joy or gratitude, just touch it softly. The ego will say “I want more of this,” but don’t listen to your ego, because as soon as you want to hold onto joy, joy will go away. Joy will go away anyway, but let it flow on like weather. The dark feelings come, you make space for them. The joyous feelings come, you make space for them. And this way you become very rich, very rich in who you are. You’re not impersonal, you’re not disassociated. Something becomes so alive inside of you. Focus. Spacious. Ready, like a martial arts artist before a contest. Relax, like a baby. It’s paradoxical when we use this sort of language, but this is the way we make space for these dark kind of feelings. This is how you make space for dread, and fear, and aloneness, and grief, and joy, and extraordinary love. Most of us have no idea how vast we can be, just how tremendously full we can become with the feeling that is the fullness of life. So lean to touch, touch softly, and stay open, stay big. Stay in the now because the now is everywhere.

Practice this, it will change your life. And I am grateful for the blessing of being able to share this with you. Thank you very much.